The Twinsie Tuesday group were painting chevrons a fortnight ago (gosh, I’m late with this post!). These blue, white and black chevrons started out in my head as blue, silver and navy.

But when I was just about to start on them, having already painted the base blue colour, I remembered these navy, silver and blue fishtail chevrons and thought that what I was about to paint was far too similar to them. So I tweaked the colour scheme a little and they became blue, white and black instead.

Blue, white and black chevrons

The base blue is Morgan Taylor West Coast Cool. It’s such a bright and striking blue; I just love the colour. I don’t organise my swatches by colour – I just add them to nail wheels as I buy them. So I don’t know for sure, but I expect if I double-checked that I would have ten bottles of polish in this colour or very similar. It’s one I always seem to pick up – my Achilles heel of a nail polish colour.

I added the white and black using Nail Vinyls, as I didn’t trust myself to get the lines straight.

Blue, white and black chevrons

I had to remove this almost as soon as I had finished it as I had an event to go to the next day and my outfit wasn’t going to match the blue. But I had worn the blue on its own for a few days, so got to enjoy it that way.

Please take a look at all the other chevron manicures from the Twinsies:

I have some (rather belated) pastel and negative space curved chevrons nails for last week’s “negative space” prompt for Twinsie Tuesday.

I’ve never much liked negative space manicures as my nails are so stained. They’re not too bad at the cuticle end, but by about half way down, they start to get very yellow. You can avoid yellow nails by buffing them or scrubbing and soaking in all sorts, like bicarbonate of soda and lemon juice. But seeing as I permanently wear polish on my nails, they are always covered up, so I never saw the point in whitening them.

Pastel and negative space curved chevrons

Even when negative nails came into fashion, I could not be bothered to restore my nails to their natural colour, so I’ve largely avoided creating them. This time around though, I thought I had to make the effort, so I tarted up my natural nails first.

I didn’t buff or scrub though; I camouflaged them. I firstly painted two coats of Ciaté Bloom Boost, a treatment that’s supposed to brighten your nails. It is a clear base with a blue tone to it. It fluoresces under UV light, so my guess is that it’s that quality that helps to somehow illuminate your nails. While it didn’t completely mask the yellowing, it certainly helped an awful lot.

On top of that, I painted two coats of Barry M Nude, and voilà, I had “naked” nails.

Pastel and negative space curved chevrons

I used some curved chevron nail guides to block out a part of my nail and then painted on two very pale pastel polishes from L’Oréal: Lemon Meringue (yellow) and Nouvelle Vague (lilac).

I don’t much like this nail art – I can’t get used to the negative space look on me – so I expect they will now go viral. It always happens with manicures I don’t like!

Please take a look at all the other manicures from the Twinsies this week:

Violet is one of the prompts, and the other is waterfall. I tried twice to create waterfall nails, and they were terrible both times. So this is the third manicure for this challenge. I don’t know quite why I can’t master the art of adding a few lines on my nails. Waterfall seems – on the face of it – to be so easy. But I simply can’t do it. Chevrons are the far better option for me. There’s no room for error – the tape does it all for you!

We’re almost there with the 52 Week Pick n Mix Challenge. There’s just one more manicure to go. If I do that one, I will have completed the entire year.

For this manicure I’ve used:

Base colour: two coats of Barry M Fondant

Chevrons: Nella Milano Vintage Violet and Barry M Plum

Top coat: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri

All manicure images are copyright to Kerruticles unless otherwise mentioned.
Nella Milano Vintage Violet was sent to me for review. All views expressed in this post are my own, honest and unbiased opinions.

This 52 Week Pick n Mix Challenge calls for either a tape mani or a green manicure. I am not at all keen on green, so this was a no-brainer of a choice for me. I’ve created a purple and lilac chevrons manicure.

The lilac is Revlon Provence. Provence in France is famous for its fields of lavender, and this is a lovely pale, cool-toned lavender shade. It’s quite sheer though and I needed three coats as the base for the chevron nails.

The purple for the plain nails and the chevrons is L’Oréal Atomic Purple. It’s also quite sheer. It’s a neon though and they often are sheer. Again this needed three coats on the plain nails. For the chevrons, I thought it might be tricky to get it opaque enough, but it was fine with just one thickish coat.

It’s the penultimate challenge week in the A2Z series challenge. So, we’re at Y, which is for You. Well, not you … me. That’s how I interpreted it anyway. And I have done some blue with silver chevrons nails.

I spent ages trying to think of what best represented me. I’ve done plenty of manicures where I have ended up writing something like, “Oh I love these; they’re very ‘me’ “. And yet, when I looked back over them, I didn’t want to just recreate them.

So, I started instead from nothing and built a manicure that fitted me. I chose blue as the overall theme, as that’s my favourite colour. It’s not always my favourite colour to put on my nails. That’s whatever takes my fancy at the time (except green, usually!). But blue is certainly the colour I have the most of.

The base for this is OPI DS Lapis. Named after the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, it has the same deep blue as the stone, with some added blue and silver micro glitter, which adds intensity. It dries matte, but I prefer it shiny, because the sparkle is more evident with top coat.

Thinking about what to add next, I considered what I like on my nails. I love to stamp, but have done quite a bit of that recently. I also love lines and symmetry, and so that led me to add some chevrons in two contrasting colours: Rimmel Navy Seal, an “air force” blue; and 2true Christy, a textured silver glitter.

About me

I'm Claire Kerr and I'm a UK nails blogger. I've only been addicted to nail polish since 2012. Some kind of mid-life crisis turned me from a tomboy into a girly girl!

I had been posting pics of my manicures to Facebook, really as a way of documenting them for myself, but I was filling up my timeline with the photos and most of my friends weren't interested. So I started this blog instead!